tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "Spatial Lexicalization in the Translation of Prepositional Phrases"

A pattern in the translation of locative prepositional phrases between English and Spanish is presented. A way of exploiting this pattern is proposed in the context of a multilingual machine translation system under development. Introduction Two of the main problems in machine translation (MT) are ambiguity and lexical gaps. Ambiguity occurs when a word in the source language (SL) has more that one translation into the target language (TL). Lexical gaps occur when a word in one language can not be translated directly into another language. This latter problem is viewed by some as the key translation problem, (Kameyama. | Spatial Lexicalization in the Translation of Prepositional Phrases Arturo Trujillo Computer Laboratory University of Cambridge Cambridge CB2 3QG England iat@ Abstract A pattern in the translation of locative prepositional phrases between English and Spanish is presented. A way of exploiting this pattern is proposed in the context of a multilingual machine translation system under development. Introduction Two of the main problems in machine translation MT are ambiguity and lexical gaps. Ambiguity occurs when a word in the source language SL has more that one translation into the target language TL . Lexical gaps occur when a word in one language can not be translated directly into another language. This latter problem is viewed by some as the key translation problem Kameyama et al. 1991 . A case in point is the translation of prepositional phrases PP . The following entry for the translations into Spanish of the preposition along demonstrates this entry taken from Garcia-Pelayo 1988 . along por by a lo largo de to the length of según according to Both problems occur here there are three different translations for the same English preposition and the second of these is a phrase used to describe a sense of along which is not encoded as one word in Spanish. Lexicalization Patterns It is argued in Talmy 1985 that languages differ in the type of information they systematically encode in lexical units. That is languages exhibit distinct lexical-ization patterns. For instance in a sentence where both the direction and manner of motion are expressed English will encode motion and manner in the same verb whereas in Spanish a distinct lexicalizationof these two meaning components will be favoured Ibid. p. 69 Spa. El globo subió por la chimenea flotando Lit. the balloon moved-up through the chimney floating Eng. The balloon floated up the chimney This work was funded by the UK Science and Engineering Research Council Here Spanish subió encodes move up whereas .